28 de julho de 2013

Barnes & Noble Inc says William Lynch is resigning as chief executive after three years on the job.The book retailer is naming Michael Huseby as president of the company and chief executive of its Nook Media unit.

However, while libraries are increasingly at peril from spending cuts, as part of the embattled country’s attempts to solve its financial crisis, the desire to use these institutions among recession-hit Spaniards is booming. In Andalusia, where Granada is situated, there has been a 50.6 per cent rise in library borrowers since Spain’s economic troubles began in 2008. In some extreme cases, such as in Seville’s libraries, it is up by 150 per cent.

Over the next couple of years Amazon would retake its marketshare until it owned at least 60% of the ebook market again. Why? Because it would build on its ecommerce expertise in general (they don’t just do ebooks), because it has better customer service than the others, and because it would have lower prices. Amazon will always have lower prices because it is willing to aggressively give up revenue to do so and its executives passionately believe that it’s the right tactic for them. Other companies don’t have the guts to match it completely.No two ways about it. Amazon has earned its marketshare.That doesn’t mean that, taken as a whole, Amazon isn’t manipulative and utterly ruthless. They are. And they have a frightening amount of resources. That’s why they’d retake the market in record time.

Many book readers are switching to the eBook format and bookstores are lamenting the entire situation. Likely, we are not going to see another 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon this year, but the prospect of one makes bookstores salivate. Bookshop owners are pining their hopes that the new mystery novel will get people in the stores and gain a bunch of sales. Tech savvy customers are buying the book from Amazon, Nook, Sony and Kobo, simply because the electronic version does not have limits.

Kobo’s newest ereader showed up on the FCC website on Friday, and even though the more interesting details are embargoed this filing told me a lot.If the hints dropped in the test reports are correct, this is probably going to be a 6″ ereader with Wifi, an HD E-ink screen, a microSD card slot, and a frontlight. And if the date for the embargo is correct the more interesting details will be revealed on 30 August, suggesting that this ereader will likely ship some time next month.

Goodreads, the leading online book community, has just announced that they now have 20 million members. That’s 4 million more members than they reported having when they were purchased by Amazon in late March 2013, and twice as many members as Goodreads had a mere 11 months ago.

To further simplify the publishing process, Kobo now offers authors a way to create an eBook from scratch using an online WYSIWYG editor within the Kobo Writing Life platform, avoiding the extra step of converting a Microsoft Word or Rich Text Format document. It also allows them to tweak the auto-converted file and maintain even tighter editorial control over their eBook. The WYSIWYG editor helps ensure the layout and formatting of the file is accurately translated the way the author intends. At the same time, authors can use the feature to quickly and easily update ePub files without using conversion tools and additional editing software.

The future for books in retail stores is not unified; it’s dispersed. To the extent that there continue to be bookstores (and although shelf space in them will continue to decline inexorably, they’ll also be around for years to come), the bookstores will increasingly be more about books for reading and less about books for using. Much of the slack can be picked up by merchants of other things, but there are challenges.

Physical books are not obsolete: The book industry is not the music industry, in part because “the book is an exceptionally good piece of technology—easy to read, portable, durable, and inexpensive.” And, though ebook sales are growing, they’re not growing at a rate that suggests that they’re going to completely take over physical books. After rising at “triple-digit annual rates” between 2009-2011, ebook sales “rose just 44%” last year. “This kind of deceleration in the growth rate isn’t what you’d expect if e-books were going to replace printed books anytime soon,” Surowiecki argues. “In a recent survey by the Codex Group, ninety-seven per cent of people who read e-books said that they were still wedded to print, and only three per cent of frequent book buyers read only digital.”

Barnes & Noble has a history of ill-timed technological decisions. In the 1990s it was focused on beating Borders and didn’t set up its website until 1997, a full two years after Amazon.com went live. It introduced a primitive e-reader too early, in 2001 (on Sept. 11, to make things worse). After Amazon introduced the Kindle in 2007, Barnes & Noble needed someone to take control of its destiny and hired Lynch to do just that.

New York Times E-Book Best Sellers

A version of this list appears in the August 4, 2013 issue of The New York Times Book Review. Rankings reflect sales for the week ending July 20, 2013.

Bertelsmann and Pearson have officially announced today that they have completed all the steps required to merge 2 of the world’s largest publishing conglomerates into an even more unwieldy monolith.Random Penguin Solutions will be jointly owned by Pearson and Bertelsmann, with the latter controlling 53% of the new company.

Rocketnews has a comprehensive English-language report on some new Nintendo-related e-book news. Nintendo is launching an e-book program for its 3DS handhelds aimed at grade-school kids, with 300 Japanese children’s books available.

I’m a fan of Project Gutenberg, not only because of its history, but also its clean interface and well-organized structure. It’s just a sheer pleasure to browse for new free books on PG, and I’m coming back to the site every week.I bet you are not aware of some of the tricks listed below.

eBooks might be seeing immense popularity in US and UK but they’re not having the same luck in France. There’s a new report out this week that shows that ebooks are still a negligible part of the french book market.According to the latest report from the Syndical national de l’édition (SNE), ebook market share rose from 1% in 2011 to 3% this year. That is a rather small percentage when compared to the US (21.67% for 2012), or even the UK (10% ish for 2012), but still higher than the most recent estimates for Germany (2.4% for 2012).

This email (I have embedded excerpts at the end of the post) reveals that the IA now sees 15 million ebook downloads each month. That’s far higher than the 4.3 million downloads reported by Project Gutenberg.IA is also now hosting 4.4 million ebooks, along with millions of other works. In comparison, the IA collection is much larger than Project Gutenberg’s 42 thousand title catalog, but also much smaller than the 30 million titles that Google Books is said to have scanned. (That last figure is unsubstantiated and includes ebooks which cannot be freely downloaded, so it should be taken with a grain of salt.)

How will digital technology change learning for the next generation? Inkling, a San Francisco-based publishing platform believes textbooks will be highly interactive, non-linear, and cloud-based. The titles will integrate all types of media—video, audio, text, photographs—as well as internet capabilities like search and social sharing.

People crave content. It has never been easier to get content published or to make the decision to become a publisher. With that, more and more startups will launch new and inventive ways for content to find an audience. Will other kinds of publishing disappear? Possibly. Is it the end of the book as we have known them to date? Doubtful. People will still want and enjoy this type of content and media. I can't imagine an end to books or magazines. With that, this moment in time is a new beginning for the publishing industry with no end in sight.

The ebook market in Germany has increased in value, as more publishers are now offering expanded content. There is a growing demand for ebooks from retail chains like Thalia and foreign entrants such as Amazon and Kobo. In 2012, the overall market share accounted for 2.4% of book sales in Germany. This represents a tripling of growth in 2011 with 0.8% and 0.5% in 2010.

New York Times E-Book Best Sellers

A version of this list appears in the June 23, 2013 issue of The New York Times Book Review. Rankings reflect sales for the week ending June 8, 2013.

Bowker Market Research reported last week that self-published ebooks now account for 12% of the entire digital publishing market. In some cases, the number actually rises to a very respectable 20%, but is fairly genre specific to crime, science fiction, fantasy, romance, and humor. 95% of these books are insufferable and are written to capitalize on trends in publishing, with authors trying to emulate successful writers such as E.L. James or Cassandra Claire.At a recent publishing conference in London, Andrew Franklin, founder and managing director of Profile Books, blasted authors who self-publish. “The overwhelming majority of self-published books are terrible—unutterable rubbish, they don’t enhance anything in the world.” He ranted on by saying, “These books come out and are met with a deathly silence, so the principle experience of self-publishing is one of disappointment. I was very shocked to learn you can buy Facebook friends and likes on social media. That is what passes for affirmation in what I think is the deeply corrupt world of self-publishing.”

Tomely (www.tomely.com), an ebookstore for independent publishers and authors, is set to launch today. Tomely has been designed specifically to facilitate direct transactions between readers and their favourite indie authors and publishers.All ebooks sold through Tomely are DRM-free, and Tomely allows readers to easily load purchased books directly onto any of their favourite devices, or send them to social reading services like Readmill.

So why is it so hard to borrow an e-book? It’s because none of the companies involved are working together. The e-reader makers, library lending software developers, and the publishers are all working at odds and it’s us who suffer. E-book library lending is broken.

Of course, the truth of these imprints will be in the storytelling. Until we see them producing consistently exciting work over the long term, neither authors nor readers should be dazzled by their daddy's name. But I strongly believe that we should also get better at taking and celebrating risks. We must allow publishers to fail better, without engaging in continual media mudslinging, or citing specific horror stories as symbols of endemic rot. Otherwise that brave, imperfect future, of which we don't yet know the contours, won't take shape at all.

Overall, if the eBook market for kids is considered the Wild West, it is one in the midst of being civilized. The resistance to providing a device to a child in place of a print book is diminishing – eBooks are already the go-to for parents and children when a distraction while travelling is needed. EBooks have a distinct advantage for parents and kids when it comes to convenience, whether that is in the ease of purchasing a new book, keeping an entire library in one easy-to-carry place, or having ready access to a world of stories and ideas anytime, anywhere. One of the most encouraging developments is the fact that eBooks seem to be helpful in turning non-readers or reluctant readers into avid ones. More booklovers in the world is a good thing for all of us, and opening up the world of books and stories to someone for whom that world was foreign and inaccessible is a tremendous opportunity and privilege.

The question is this: What is the future for B&N if it abandons the Nook? I know that top B&N management thinks the future will be rosier if Nook is spun off or sold or, in a worse case scenario, allowed to die, but that is really just another example of why B&N will likely follow Borders in the absence of management change. Short-sighted thinking seems to be the rule, which is exactly the opposite of Amazon’s management. I have to give Amazon and Jeff Bezos the credit they are due — they think long-term not short-term, which is why Amazon controls the retail book market in the United States.

This chart illustrates very clearly something that agents have been arguing for several years now, and that publishers have been saying just isn’t true: that their savings on printing, binding and distribution make up for the lower revenue from lower e-book prices– and that increased profitability is coming entirely off the backs of authors.

Sony’s latest ereader showed up on the FCC website today and it looks like the third time could be a charm. We don’t know much about the PRS-T3 (most of the important stuff is hidden), but I have gleaned a few details from the test reports and other docs posted on the website.